The Power of Family Stories - Ep. 98

Unleash the power of storytelling on your child's developmental journey! Join us as we explore the transformative influence of family narratives on children. Based on the research of Robin Fivush and Marshall P. Duke, we reveal the multitude of benefits kids reap when they know their family tales. Their resilience, self-esteem, and social skills see a significant boost. More than that, we consider how these stories can be effectively integrated into therapy, serving as instruments to enhance episodic memory, predictable behavior, vocabulary, and critical thinking. You’ll also hear some of our personal family narratives and learn about the critical thinking triangle, a handy tool from the Story Grammar Marker people.

Take a step further into the world of stories with us. We share a heartwarming tale of a school physical therapist whose professional advice led a first grader's parents to seek help beyond the school's resources. We introduce you to Dan and his father's inspiring journey that was profoundly influenced by a teacher who spurred a love for reading. Yet, we also know that not every story has a happy ending, and we guide you on how to handle narratives that don't end well and finding ways to move forward.

Make no mistake - family stories are powerful, and so are the rituals that accompany them. As we delve deeper, we uncover how children comprehend the personalities of their family members via these stories and the rituals they observe. Persistence is the key to storytelling, and we've got useful tips on how families can tell their stories effectively. Drawing from our years of experience as SLPs, we offer guidance on how to help families share their narratives and put them into a physical form. So, what are you waiting for? Tune into the Speech Umbrella and start harnessing the power of family stories today!

--- Useful Links ---
emoji handout 
https://storyintelligence.com/fivush-%26-duke 
Story Grammar Marker , Do You Do Two?    
Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Hi there, welcome to the Speech Umbrella podcast. I think you're going to love today's episode because who doesn't love a good story? I've been wanting to do this podcast for a long time, and with Thanksgiving and family togetherness coming up, this seemed like the perfect time. Today, we're not talking about just any stories. We're talking about the kinds of stories that have a big, dare I say, huge, positive impact on children, and that is their own family stories. The effect of children, knowing their family stories has been studied by Robin Fivush and Marshall P. Duke. They are professors of psychology at Emory University. There are studies show that children who know their family stories benefit in so many ways. For example, they are far more likely to have a high self-esteem, have less anger and aggression, have higher social and academic competence and they are more resilient. That was SLPs, we know how valuable stories are. So what if we could incorporate some family stories into our therapy? How awesome would that be? I have done some of that in therapy and I love it. Plus, I don't know who needs more resiliency than the children and families we serve. So this podcast is for SLPs and for families alike. In addition to some of the advantages discovered by Fivush and Duke, here's some ones that I came up with specific to language. Family stories help with episodic memory, which is very important when I'm working with children on the autism spectrum. They have an element of repetition that our clients really benefit from. Children love to hear their favorite family stories over and over again. And they can start to anticipate the language and fill in the words when they have repetition.

 Through stories, they learn about different personalities and begin to expect certain behavior from certain people. Predictable behavior from adults is very important for children. They learn vocabulary for a range of emotions and also that stories can have conflicting emotions. Finally in therapy, you can introduce the critical thinking triangle, one of my favorite tools. The critical thinking triangle is a tool developed by the Story Grammar Marker people. Although I generally use the Story Champs method in therapy. I do pull in the critical thinking triangle with clients who are ready to form complex sentences that describe problems, emotions, and reactions. Okay. That was a very long introduction. So let's get to the good stuff. I'm going to use a lot of stories to illustrate my points. They are my own family stories and a few of Dan's. Uh, for those of you who have missed hearing his voice, he's back today to share a few of his family stories. I know it's a bit of an indulgence to go down memory lane with our own stories, but this being a public platform, I really couldn't use anyone else's stories. So you get to hear our own. Here's the setup for today. I'm going to describe the critical thinking triangle, talk about what kinds of stories are best, what about negative stories and what do we do with them? How do we learn about characterization through stories? What do rituals have to do with family stories? And then they'll have some suggestions for parents and SLPs at the end.

 The critical thinking triangle is a visual organizer. So picture a triangle in your mind. At one point of the triangle, we have the problem. At another point, we have the feeling, and at the last point we have the plan. And there are boxes on this visual organizer to write feeling words, thinking and planning words and connecting words. You've got to have those conjunctions, to explain why. It's a great way to help kids think through complex sentences.

We create sentences like this all the time with very little thought about how hard it is for some of our clients to do this. Now here's my first story to illustrate the critical thinking triangle. When my sisters and I got together with our cousins, we went through phases of play. There was a beauty pageant phase, the buried treasure phase, and the one my mother somehow survived, I don't know how, the candy making phase. We only made one kind of candy, rock candy, but we made it often. One summer day, one of my cousins was visiting us and my mother had to run an errand. The last thing she said to us before she left the house was don't cook anything. And as soon as she was out the door, my cousin suggested making rock candy. When I pointed out my mother said not to cook anything, she said, my mother was just trying to save us, going to the extra work and that she truly would love nothing more than to come home to freshly made candy. So we would really be doing her a favor by making candy. I had no answer to her stunning logic. So we commenced making rock candy.

When it got to the part where we added the Karo syrup, my cousin said, I love Karo syrup, let's put in twice as much as the recipe says. So we did. And the candy never set up. It never got to the hardball stage. No surprise there. Well time was getting on. My mother would be coming home soon and we had this candy in the middle of being made. We got a little desperate. And we poured it onto cookie sheets anyway, and then hid the sticky cookie sheets of candy, one under a bedroom rug, and one in her suitcase.

Yeah. If I were to run this story through their critical thinking triangle. I could say several things. Let's say I start by choosing just one of the problems. Let's take the candy not setting up. Following that was fear of being caught and the plan was to hide the candy. So I'd write, decided in the plan box, afraid in the feeling box. And so in the connecting words box. Then my sentence would go like this. The candy never got hard and we were afraid of getting in trouble, so we hid it. By the way. And is also a connecting word, but I'm usually aiming for more complex conjunctions at this level. Now that is just one example. There are several ways to talk about this event. My children loved hearing the story about me being naughty.

 Fivush and Duke found the kids who make connections to family stories who think I'm like that to have a better outcome. So tell those stories about when you were mischievous. Yes, they would come family legends.

 Okay, What kind of stories are best. The answer is all kinds. The stories don't have to be elaborate or complete, small everyday stories that come in snippets are valuable. With those stories that come in snippets over time, children fill in the fragments. This is a departure from the story formula we typically teach in therapy, but they are true to real life. Some stories don't come all wrapped up in a neat package with your character and your setting and your problem in your feeling and your action and your resolution.

 Some of my most precious family memories are really so small. For example, here's when my dad told me. He was swimming a mile for a merit badge, and the requirement was that you have to swim the entire length without putting your foot down on the bottom. He told me he was so tired that one of his feet drifted down in his toe just barely brushed the bottom. He immediately pulled it back up and finished the mile. But as he was receiving his reward, inside he wondered if he really deserved it. I think that says a lot about his character and his integrity.

Here's a story so short, it might not even be a story, but it still tells us a whole lot about the time and place. When I was a young mom, I was feeling the pressure of everything that went with kid birthday parties. And I wondered, how did we even get to this place where kids birthday parties are such a production. I asked my mom how her family had celebrated birthdays when she was young. And she said, we got to sleep in. Isn't that great? That qualifies as a story because it comes with all of this setting and understanding about how she grew up compared to how we do things now. And that is very valuable for kids to understand.

But complete stories are great too. And Dan is going to tell you one of his right now.

Denise ATR: When I was a young boy, I walked quite pigeon toed. And when I was in fourth grade, my mom took me to a specialist who determined that my right leg was twisted inward, about 45 degrees and my left leg about 30, 35 degrees. And so that's why I'd walked pigeon toed. The solution he recommended was that they would go in and in a surgery, break both my legs and twist them out and then have both bones heal again. And so I would be at about six months in a wheelchair. And about a year on um, crutches before I completely healed. Well, that was a pretty traumatic thought for the fourth grader. And so I begged my mom to let me play little league football. Because I knew that after I'd had the surgery, I would never be able to play football again. So during that experience of football, I practiced every day and we ran laps. And so every day, while I was running those endless laps. I focus very hard on keeping my feet straight. So, you know, obviously you can't run real well pigeon toed, but I was really focusing on keeping my feet straight. Interestingly enough after the, by the end of the season, my feet had straightened out enough that we never went back to the doctor. We never had the surgery and I owe football my beautiful. gait.

Denise: You were your own physical therapist. I love that story. And I use that story. Several years ago when I started working at a new school. My first day in the school, a lot of people came to me and said, you need to know about this girl. And she was in first grade. And you just can't understand anything she says. And everyone was really concerned about her. And what are you going to do, speech therapist? Of course, after the first five or 10 minutes with her? Yeah, she was like 10% intelligible on a good day. But as I was figuring out what to do, I noticed other things. I noticed that she was congested all the time. I noticed she walked pigeon toed, particularly one foot quite turned in. And so after about six weeks when we had the parent night, she came in with her mom and I said, I've been taught to look at the whole child. I'm looking at her speech, I'm figuring this out, but have you noticed that she's always congested and stuffy and her mom was like, oh, I guess she is. And I said also, have you noticed the way she walks. You know, if it's kind of turned in. Well, her mom did know about that, but sometimes. I think people think when you have a child who has a lot of stuff going on, that that's just the way they are. And so I told them that story. I told them Dan's story about how his foot straightened out. And I said, maybe you could go to the physical therapist and figure out what to do because a school physical therapist will not provide services as long as the child can walk. As long as they can get from one place to another, that's not within their scope of practice in the school. So they did, they had the means to go to a private physical therapist. When several months later, her mom texted me and said, thank you so much, it used to take her 45 minutes to ride her scooter to school and she can now get to school in 15 minutes.

And maybe without your story. That's still would have happened, but maybe that story helped them think, oh, this is possible. This is possible for my daughter who's got all this other stuff going on. But maybe this is possible. And I also want it to give her a little bit of idea that she could do this, that she could persist because someone else had done it.

 So that's the power of stories. Now what about negative stories? Well, it turns out well adapted families tell negative stories too. Every family has ups and downs and a down followed by an up is a lesson in resilience. They send the message that everything is not going to go good all the time. And so here's another story from Dan about his father and the adversity he faced early on.

Denise ATR: My dad was born at the beginning of the Great Depression and, as such in rural Utah and Idaho, moved around a lot and he didn't do particularly well in school. When he went to first grade, he actually, did very poorly and he said that he couldn't remember anything from the first grade. And the schools wanted to hold him back. And having repeat the first grade, which my dad thought was a great idea because his younger sister would be in the same grade as him, but his parents didn't want that. And they actually talked the school out of it and had him push on to second grade. Shortly after they started the second grade, they moved to Seattle, Washington so his dad could find work and then they moved around again in a couple of years back to Soda Springs, Idaho, which is this tiny little, little town in rural Idaho. By that point, he was in the fourth grade and he was really behind. And the school teacher there, had all, well, she only had eight students, two of her own children and the six children from the Strattons. And so, this lady was very concerned about dad and she in fourth grade taught him phonics and how to read. She discovered that he couldn't even see the blackboard, that he needed glasses. And she spent a lot of time over the next couple of years, working with him and teaching him to read and working with him to really expand his interest and desire in reading. And she challenged him to read every book in their little library that they had. And he read every book in the library, at least once. And it really turned him around. He became a really good student. He actually made the Dean's list in college. He started in electrical engineering and then later switched to teaching history. He really enjoyed teaching history after he graduated.

Denise: I remember reading in the personal history he wrote, that he made sure that the students who were struggling participated. And that the parents of those students who struggled really, really appreciated the effort he put towards making sure that they felt like they were smart. And I also love your parents book cases. So you'll have to describe your parents book cases. My mom

Denise ATR: and dad were very big readers and they always encouraged us in reading. And we had these bookcases that dad had made. They were, I think there were 10 foot planks, oh, wood boards. They were put on cinder blocks. And it went all the way to the ceiling in our little living room. And each book shelf was two deep in books. In fact, there were so many books on there, Denise didn't even know, we were dating, she didn't even know there was a whole nother layer of books behind the books in front, and I read a good portion of those books and quite enjoyed them. And it was interesting, that is. We were dividing up my parents' property after they died, the books were some of the things that people really fought over.

Denise: I have the Richard Scarry books in my waiting room. That's

Denise ATR: right? Yes. You won that battle.

Denise: Yes. I love that story. Because it just shows how someone can turn around, um with help. Your dad had help, but I know we put a lot of his own perseverance into it. And became a great reader for the rest of his life.

Okay, let's move on and talk a little bit more about stories that might not have such a great outcome. Fivush made a point of mentioning that some stories don't have a great outcome and the lesson is you just put bad things behind you, you just get through it. Some of the families they studied included Holocaust survivors. And you can totally understand how there might be no great outcome in situations like that. Um, but you learn to move on. When I was very young, my father was thrown from a horse and sustained a traumatic brain injury. It resulted in personality changes that were pretty challenging for everyone. And this is a situation where there was no great outcome, but we got through it. And sometimes people don't talk much about bad experiences because they are so painful. And that was the case with my father's TBI. We really didn't talk about it much. It was just very sad and very tragic and painful for everyone involved. But people tell stories through their behavior, and this is what Fivush discovered, that children pick up on the story through the behavior. And my daughter saw how my mother coped, and got a sense of her incredible strength. And she actually wrote in a school assignment that she wanted to be like my mother and described how she saw her coping with a really difficult situation. And also she told me the story, she had quite a special moment with my father. This is one of those tiny stories with big significance. My father's voice was damaged due to his accident and it had a particular rough quality to it and unfortunately he came across as sounding angry when he was just trying to articulate clearly. And one night she was sitting next to my father, they were watching War Horse and he said something like, look at that little guy while he was watching the movie. And she told me later that she heard him speak in a different voice. The voice that he must've had before his accident. I believe that experience gave her a broader view of who he was.

Speaking of understanding who people are, how do we come to understand characterization through family stories? And here's my take. Whenever I pull up Assignments Cat Video in therapy. My clients eagerly anticipate watching it. That's because they know the cat's personality. They know he's going to be funny and he's going to be snarky and probably get in trouble and still be loved by his owner. They have seen enough stories to know his personality. When we tell family stories, kids get to know the characters. They learn to expect certain personalities to behave certain ways and they get real excited like, oh, here comes that part. Here comes that character that I love in this story.

And I think that perhaps they learned the behavior before they learn the words to describe the personality. For example in the podcast called, Do You Do To, I mentioned how Dan kept a stash of Tonka trucks in his crib and launched them at people, particularly his long suffering mother. Now sure, he was exploring trajectory, but my kids are not surprised to learn this about him because he's energetic and he likes to be doing things and interacting with people.

Denise ATR: And I was angry at her.

Denise: Um, the stories are a great time to talk about characters and introduce personality vocabulary. Now here's another one about my sister, because she is vivacious and bubbly and she's fun to be with. She's a nurse in labor and delivery. Earlier this month, we were at my grandmother's funeral. My grandmother lived to be 102, and a group of us were marveling at how she survived cancer and being a sickly baby. We hadn't even known that she was a sick baby before the funeral. And Dan, ever the tease, was poking my sister a bit about not knowing what the problem was, after all you're a nurse. Can't you solve this? And I'm about to say, of course you can't solve it as too far in the past. We don't know enough. And all of a sudden we were in a moving car at the moment and she squealed and she literally bounced out of her seat. She turned around, all the way around to face us and said, I figured it out. And she said, I figured it out. I know why she was sick.

Now that becomes part of the story. Not just that she figured it out, but how she acted when she figured it out. And that's how we would have expected her to act. Because we know her personality and we were all just laughing, was part of the joy of being with her family and enjoying her personality on, Hey, she did figure out why Grandma was a sick baby. I can't help thinking children who learn the characters in family stories are going to have an easier time learning vocabulary that describes personality traits.

Now let's talk about the connection between rituals and family stories. Rituals provide stability and predictability in an uncertain world. What's more, stories become rituals and rituals become stories. I have a client whose very first episodic memory was of the ritual she had going to McDonald's for pancakes after therapy. She did it every week. She looked forward to it. And she was able to recall it and draw it and talk about it. It was the very first thing she was able to remember and talk about that had happened in the past.

If you're interested in hearing more about drawing episodic memory, check out the Conversation Game that's, episode 50.

Here's one last family story about how a ritual became a story. And Dan's going to tell it because he started it.

it was the Christmas after Toy Story was released and our oldest son absolutely loved the little army man or was it me, that absolutely loved the little army men? I don't remember. But anyway, we got a bucket of soldiers. And as we were putting out the presents after the kids were put in bed, I couldn't resist. I opened the bucket of soldiers and I set them up and I actually had a platoon guarding the tree in the Christmas tree, on different branches and then the kids had a good time the next morning finding all the little soldiers that were hiding in the tree. And then of course we had to make sure we gave it a good shake when it was all ready to go so that we didn't lose any soldiers. Because, you know, you never leave a man behind. Well, the kids took that little experience, and the next year, when we put up the tree, we found little army men, all over in the tree and we have found army men in our Christmas tree for the next 20 some years, because that is their ritual. Every year, there has to be at least one army man in the tree. And he stays in the box with the Christmas tree now. Because now we can only find about three of them. That's fine. Exact same color as a Christmas tree. Yep. And so now, we just, we continue, even though the kids have left, we still put our army man in the tree and take pictures off of him and send them to them so they know that our Christmas tree is well guarded. And one of the things Fivish and Duke said is, your teenagers are listening to the stories, even when they roll their eyes. They're listening to the stories. It's very good for them. And I'll tell you, our teenagers did notice when the soldiers were in the Christmas tree, even if they did the little bit of eye roll thing.

Okay. Well, you've heard a lot of our family's stories. Let's move on to some suggestions for families who want to be intentional about telling stories. Anyone can tell a story. You don't have to be good at it. It's your lived experience. So just tell the story. Stories just don't happen in the past. They are happening and they evolve over time. For children to know that they are part of an ongoing story gives them strength and resilience. So I should tell the stories. You can start in the past and you can move it forward.

Use photos. They are especially helpful for kids who are visually oriented, like a lot of the kids we work with. The auditory channel is not as strong as a visual channel. As a child. I love looking at those old black and white photos of my ancestors. I thought that was a great, so use photos.

You have more stories than you think you have. A little everyday stories are just as important as the big ones. You don't have to make it a big production. Oh, I don't have this. Oh story my mind, I don't have. The whole complete thing figured out how to tell it like a storyteller. It doesn't matter. Just tell the story.

And here's one of my favorite quotes from a very wise man, it's never too early and it's never too late. So. If you haven't been telling stories, start now.

And remember the magic words are, that reminds me. We see something, and you say that reminds me. And there's your story. Now some tips for speech therapists. Solicit stories from your client's families, sometimes parents can get kind of busy. So if you refer them to this podcast and say hey, this is why stories are so important. Can you send me some stories? Maybe that will help you. I've solicited stories from families. Some have been more responsive than others because some people just get busy, but I think if they understood how critical it was, Then you would have an easier time getting the stories from them. But while you're waiting for those stories to come in, you can model your own family stories. You can act out the stories. My clients have acted out the candy story and they have loved it.

You can play reporter and have children interview each other about their family stories. You can practice summarizing key story parts, using the critical thinking triangle. You can video them telling their family stories. You can get so much mileage out of one story. You can do so many things with that. So even if you get just one family story for one of your clients, you can do a whole lot with it. Now if you're wondering what goals you might address, you could have a goal for building episodic memory, a goal for telling all the critical parts of a story. Now remember, it may not be the complete story, but if your goal is for them to include all the parts that are critical to that story. And that would be good enough.

You can have a goal for them to use complex sentences. Identifying all the parts of the critical thinking triangle and forming a sentence from it. If your clients are struggling with a range of emotions, you might have a goal for them to use the vocabulary around feelings and emotions. Now I have used emoji faces with a client who really struggled to identify emotions. And what we did was we looked at the print out of the emoji faces. We got a white board and we drew the emoji faces ourselves side by side. I drew it and she kind of looked at my drawing, and she looked at the emoji and she figured out how to draw it, even though her fine motor skills aren't great. And she absolutely loved this. And then we made ourselves a list, a physical list that we wrote down and we talked about events that might trigger that emotion. And I talked about an event that triggered that emotion in me. And we talked about general events that anyone might experience to trigger that emotion before I asked her. Because it was really hard for her to come up with an event that triggered that emotion in her, but she was able to do it after all those examples and after drawing the faces.

And by the way, I have a free handout of those emoji faces in my free resource library. So you can go to thespeechumbrella.com/free and sign up for the free resource library and get that.

I've also used those emoji faces along with the critical thinking triangle and a story to help them create those really, really complex sentences.

Here's a suggestion I love from these researchers Fivush and Duke. They suggest putting the stories in a physical form so students can carry the stories with them. A lot of things we have today are sort of intangible. So Videos are great. You know, I suggested using videos as one of the things you can do, but they are a bit transitory. They're here, they're gone. And if you have something physically written on a piece of paper, if you have an illustration that they drew themselves of the story, I think it's sticks better. It's something they can hold, something they can look at. Now remember they're visual.

Sometimes, for the younger kids who are a little bit stuck on starting this story, just having them drawing illustration gets the creative juices flowing.

If you'd like to hear more about this family stories. You can hear Fivush and Duke in a four-part interview, which I'll link in the show notes. Remember to head on over to thespeechumbrella.com to get that free emoji download.

Thanks for joining me under the Speech Umbrella today. I hope you learned something to help you in your therapy. If you did, please share this podcast with a fellow speech therapist and leave a five star review on Apple iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your subscriptions.

While there come on over to thespeechumbrella.com, where you will find transcripts, links, and my free resource library. I also have some other valuable courses and therapy aids in my store. That's all at thespeechumbrella.com.

Let's connect on social media. I'm dstrattonslp on Instagram and the speech umbrella on Facebook and YouTube. You can also find me on TPT. I hope to talk to you soon. Bye.